Betrayal Preophesies

Betrayal Prophecies

Culled From: http://infidels.org/library/modern/jim_lippard/fabulous-prophecies.html

A number of alleged prophecies relate to Jesus' betrayal by Judas. These include prophecies that Jesus would be betrayed by a friend for thirty pieces of silver and that this money would be thrown into the temple and used to buy a potter's field. Two verses taken as prophecies of betrayal by a friend are Psalms 41:9 and Psalms 55:12-14, the former of which reads, "Even my close friend, in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted up his heel against me." Both are psalms which speak of feelings of pain from being betrayed by a close and trusted friend. Yet Jesus already had foreknowledge of his betrayal by Judas (John 13:21-26), and so must not have trusted him. When the gospel of John (13:18) quotes from Psalms 41:9, it tacitly admits this problem by omitting the phrase "in whom I trusted." Neither verse from the Hebrew scriptures gives any indication of being intended as prophetic.

Matthew 26:14-15 states that Judas Iscariot was paid thirty pieces of silver by the Jewish priests as payment for his betrayal. Matthew 27:9-10 claims that this is done to fulfill a prophecy of Jeremiah:

Then that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled, saying, "And they took the thirty pieces of silver for the price of the one whose price had been set by the sons of Israel; and they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord directed me."

The problem here is that the quoted verse appears nowhere in the book of Jeremiah. There is a verse which is quite similar in the book of Zechariah, but there the prophet Zechariah is speaking about himself and no betrayal is involved. Christian apologist Gleason Archer (1982, p. 345) tries to resolve this problem by citing various verses in Jeremiah which refer to "the prophet purchasing a field in Anathoth for a certain number of shekels" (32:6-9), "the prophet as watching a potter fashioning earthenware vessels in his house" (18:2), "a potter near the temple" (19:2), and God saying "Even so I will break this people and this city as one breaks a potter's vessel" (19:11). Why does Archer write "a certain number of shekels" instead of giving the number specified in Jeremiah? Because Jeremiah 32:9says seventeen shekels, not thirty. What Archer has done here is simply look for the words "potter," "shekel," and "field" in an attempt to argue that Matthew really was referring to Jeremiah rather than Zechariah. But there is really no question that Matthew meant to refer to Zechariah rather than Jeremiah. Compare Zechariah 11:12-13:

And I said to them, "If it is good in your sight, give me my wages; but if not, never mind!" So they weighed out thirty shekels of silver as my wages. Then the Lord said to me, "Throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by them." So I took the thirty shekels of silver and threw them to the potter in the house of the Lord.

Again, this is Zechariah speaking of his own experience rather than a messianic prophecy. But Matthew 27:5-7 tries to fulfill this non-prophecy by telling a story of Judas Iscariot throwing his payment into the temple before committing suicide, after which the priests use the money to buy a potter's field. This story does not appear in the other gospels (though Acts 1:18-19 says that Judas himself, rather than the priests, bought a field with the (unspecified amount of) money earned by his betrayal).

Another problem with this alleged prophecy is that in the earliest (Syriac) manuscripts of Zechariah, verse 13 does not even contain the word "potter"--instead, it says "treasury," which makes more sense but further damages its credibility as prophecy. (The Revised Standard Version gives the verse as "Cast it into the treasury," with the "to the potter" translation relegated to a footnote.)